From
the EditorsThe
Automated
Vehicle Symposium 2015 (AVS 2015) was
another resounding success. Susan Spencer,
CAVCOE’s newest Senior Associate,
moderated the Legal breakout group and
reports that once again this was the
‘go-to’ conference for all things AV.
The proceedings can be found here.

The big announcement linked to the start of
AVS 2015 was the opening of the University
of Michigan's Mcity AV test facility. Our
friends at Driverless
Transportation report: “The $6.5
million Mcity boasts 32 acres featuring a
simulation of urban and suburban roads with
traffic signals, intersections, crosswalks,
circles, tunnels, construction sites,
buildings, and Potemkin Village-style
building fronts.”

On a different topic, we send our
congratulations to Mike Skupien and Alex
Rodrigues, two Mechatronics undergraduate
students at the University of Waterloo,
Ontario, Canada for their development of an
autonomous golf cart (see the photo above).
They spent $10,000 of their own money to buy
all the parts and the golf cart. Their
company, ‘Varden Labs’ is already
raising financing. The golf cart was
recently featured on a news
item on CTV. We wish these two very
talented developers / entrepreneurs much
success in the future.

The Automakers, Tier 1s and AV DevelopersMercedes Benz:
Drivers of the next generation Mercedes-Benz
E-Class due out next spring will be able to
travel at speeds of more than 100 miles per
hour, according to an article in The
Detroit Bureau. The partially-automated
car will use Advanced Driver Assistance
Systems (ADAS) to increase comfort and
relieve stress. The new system for the 2017
E-Class is an incremental advance on
technology currently offered by Mercedes. It
will come with a Distance Pilot Distronic
function that automatically maintains the
correct distance from vehicles in front of
it by adjusting the car’s higher desired
speed to that of a slower-moving vehicle
ahead before accelerating back up to the
desired speed once the way ahead is clear
again – it can also follow traffic ahead
in its lane at speeds from 0 to 190 kph.
This next level Intelligent Drive remains a
semi-automated system in which the
driver’s hands still need to be on the
steering wheel.

Google: The Self-Driving
Car Project Report for June 2015
provides some interesting insight into the
status and results. For example, since the
start of the project in 2009, Google's cars
have driven 1,057,962 miles (almost 1.7
million km) in autonomous mode. They are
currently averaging 10,000 autonomous miles
(16,000 km) per week on public streets. The
report also includes links to a couple of
videos and contains information on the
latest traffic accidents using the summary
information filed with the California DMV.

Google: Following the announcement
that one of their Lexus vehicles would be
tested in Austin, Texas, the safety of AVs
continued to be a very hot topic. Google announced,
with video, the news that one of their
Lexus vehicles had been involved in their
first injury crash, the online community
went into a frenzy, pushing the /r/selfdrivingcars/
sub-Reddit over the 10,000 subscriptions
mark. It also resulted in this rather
amusing satire from ‘the
Onion’.Transit
/ TransportationSmartRail
World reports that Uber has announced a
partnership with the Metropolitan Atlanta
Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) to help
solve the challenge of passengers getting to
or from the station or bus stop. Uber is
offering Atlanta residents who are new to
the service to sign up get their first trip
free, up to a $20 value. MARTA CEO Keith
Parker speaking to the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution acknowledged that Uber
can help complete journeys for passengers
using mass transit in Atlanta; “There are
places that don’t make sense for us to add
new bus or train service. This Uber
partnership is to take care of that last
mile of service.” For us at CAVCOE, this
is an excellent example of how Uber -- and
the AV version in the future -- can be
complementary to traditional transit
services. Any city seeking to ban Uber and
similar services could well be, without
realizing it, having a negative impact on a
service that can actually help transit..

An increasing number of articles are
highlighting the multifaceted impacts of AVs
on municipalities, just as CAVCOE did in the
joint
report with the Conference Board of
Canada and the Van Horne Institute back in
January, 2015. PC
Magazine wonders how cities will deal
with a major reduction in income from
traffic penalties and parking fines.
The Economist notes that “Overturning
industries and redefining urban life,
self-driving cars promise to be as
disruptive and transformative a technology
as the mobile phone.” The Helsinki
Times declares provocatively:
“Helsinki to have little need for parking
spaces in 2030”.

AV
Trials
Officials in Singapore are expected to
authorize an on-demand driverless taxi trial
on public roads -- a concept that could
change the very nature of urban mobility,
with shared autonomous vehicles operating as
a form of point-to-point transit system,
according to an item in
CityLab. “For me, really the big
benefit of this technology is essentially
making car-sharing as convenient as private
car-ownership, but also as sustainable and
scalable as public transportation,” says
Emilio Frazzoli, the lead investigator for
the urban mobility component of the
Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and
Technology (SMART), a research consortium
that’s applied to run the taxi pilot.

Government
/ Regulatory
The Ontario government will hold a webcast
to brief potential bidders on the details of
the second phase of funding for the
Connected Vehicle/Autonomous Vehicle (CVAV)
Program, which we reported on last month.
The CVAV program encourages business and
academic institutions to develop and
commercialize innovations in CVAV
technologies. Offered by the Ontario Centres
of Excellence (OCE) on behalf of the Ontario
Ministry of Transportation and Ministry of
Economic Development Employment and
Infrastructure, the CVAV Program funds
industry-led projects. The webcast
describing this program is planned for Thursday
August 6, 2015, at 12:00n-1:00pm. The
webcast agenda is here
and the registration link is here.

The UK
government has published The Pathway
to Driverless Cars: A Code of Practice for
Testing. The document provides guidance
for anyone wishing to conduct testing of
highly or fully automated vehicle
technologies on public roads or in other
public places in the UK. It details
recommendations which the government
believes should be followed to maintain
safety and minimize potential risks. The
vision for the Code of Practice is that
through careful testing, well designed
automated vehicles will be developed which,
when operating autonomously, improve the
safety of all road users.

A recent article in Wired
reports on a Brookings Institution study
that says, before long, self-driving cars
will deliver a lot of benefits. First and
foremost, they’ll increase safety.
Accidents won’t be eliminated, but will
produce better results than humans. One
potential loser in this result is local
governments. Once a computer is doing the
driving, it's a safe bet we won’t do
things like speed, run red lights, park
illegally, or drive drunk. And that means we
won’t be fined for doing those things and
that is going to put the squeeze on city
budgets, according to the Brookings
Institution report. “Local governments
have viewed their sources of revenue and
planned around revenue from the perspective
of, ‘We can tax people in a very
structured and predictable manner,'” says
Kevin Desouza, a professor at Arizona State
University and one of the report’s
authors. There are no national numbers
indicating how much American drivers shell
out in traffic violation fines, but the
report puts the total in the hundreds of
millions of dollars. Los Angeles, for
example, collected $161 million from parking
tickets in 2014. Twenty cities in California
take in $40 million every year from towing
cars, splitting that money with the tow
companies. In total, that is a lot of lost
revenue that has to be factored into future
city budgets.

Other
AV ArticlesAdam
Jonas, the well-known Lead Auto Analyst at
Morgan Stanley, was interviewed recently on Bloomberg
Business TV. He predicted that
driverless cars will be here in three years.

A study by KPMG, as reported in Insurance
Journal, states that insurers are
unprepared for the disruption caused by
self-driving cars. The majority of
property/casualty insurers do not expect
autonomous or self-driving vehicles to have
a real impact on their auto insurance
business for another decade and have not
adjusted their business models to prepare
for the disruption. Many insurer executives
also believe that government will slow the
introduction of autonomous vehicles. CAVCOE
agrees that car insurers are unprepared, but
we disagree with the insurers' estimate of
the time-line involved. CAVCOE and
independent analysts such as Adam Jonas of
Morgan Stanley (see the above paragraph)
believe that AVs will be in showrooms in the
next 3-5 years.

CAVCOE's Paul Godsmark and Barrie Kirk
continue to be interviewed for various media
items on AVs. A recent article in the Globe
and Mail titled 'Driverless trucks could
mean 'game over' for thousands of jobs' had
multiple quotes from Paul. Also recently,
Barrie was interviewed by the CBC for an
item on driverless heavy haulers being
purchased by Suncor for the oil sands. This
resulted in an email to us in which the
writer took Barrie to task for advocating
for AVs and putting people out of work. This
is just one example of the highly-charged
atmosphere we can expect as people react to
the prospect of future job losses.

TechnologyBestMile,
based in Lausanne, Switzerland, has
announced a mobile app for on-demand
mobility, and especially for requesting an
fully-autonomous shuttle operating on the École
Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
campus. The shuttles are low-speed,
electric, fully autonomous mini-buses such
as those marketed by Navya and and Robosoft.
The new app is available for iOS and Android
smartphones.

Globe
Newswire reports that Ambarella, a
leading developer of video compression and
image processing semiconductors, has
acquired VisLab, a privately held Italian
company based in Parma, Italy for US$30
million. VisLab, the Vision and Intelligent
Systems Laboratory at the University of
Parma, is a pioneer in perception systems
and autonomous vehicle research. The company
has developed computer vision and
intelligent control systems for automotive
and other commercial applications, including
Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and
several generations of autonomous vehicle
driving systems. These include
"Porter," an autonomous vehicle
that made a 13,000 km autonomous trip from
Italy to China in 2010.

High-precision maps are essential for highly
automated driving. Emerging
Technologies Blog reports that Bosch is
using TomTom maps in its automated test
vehicles. Freeways and freeway-like roads in
Germany are to be digitized for automated
driving by the end of 2015. Maps for highly
automated driving have to be accurate to
decimeter precision. The development of
automated driving is a puzzle with many
pieces. Together with the Dutch map and
traffic provider TomTom, Bosch is getting
closer to the complete picture. The two
companies have agreed to collaborate in the
area of maps for highly automated driving.
Under this agreement, TomTom is designing
the necessary maps, while Bosch, on the
basis of its systems engineering work, is
defining the specifications these maps have
to meet.